A decade after Apple Watch launched, WhatsApp finally launched a dedicated app for the smartwatch Tuesday — ending years of frustration for users who could only respond to notifications from their wrist. The messaging service brings full chat functionality to your wrist with support for messages, voice notes and calls, Meta said.
Meta continues poaching high-profile executives from Apple’s AI team for its Superintelligence group. The latest hire is Ke Yang, who Apple recently appointed to lead its Answers, Knowledge and Information team.
Apple’s team is making an “answer engine” that will crawl the web to answer simple search queries.
Following the success of its Ray-Ban Meta glasses, Meta has launched its Ray-Ban Display glasses. This is a step up from its previous efforts, as the smart glasses feature a built-in display in the right lens.
The glasses come with a Neural Band that recognizes your hand movements and helps you navigate through the glasses’ UI.
It took far longer than necessary, but Meta introduced on Wednesday an Instagram application that takes advantage of the iPad’s large screen.
Meta emphasizes the new app’s ability to play Reels — short videos that collectively rack up billions of views a day.
Apple faces big challenges in its artificial intelligence efforts as another key researcher leaves the company to join Meta’s ambitious superintelligence project, according to a new report Tuesday. The departure marks the fourth AI expert to leave Apple’s foundation models team in just one month, raising questions about the future of Apple Intelligence and the company’s AI strategy.
Apple’s AI ambitions take a hit as a key executive leading its AI model efforts departs the company. Meta has successfully managed to poach Ruoming Pang, who managed Apple’s foundation models team.
Meta is forming a new superintelligence team and reportedly offering pay packages of up to $100 million to attract top AI talent.
Like its other services, Meta will bring ads to WhatsApp in the form of promoted channels and status ads.
Additionally, to support creators, WhatsApp will introduce support for channel subscriptions.
A new battle brews in the tech world as major app developers band together to challenge Apple and Google’s control over the mobile ecosystem, according to a new report. Meta, Match and Spotify join forces against Apple and Google, forming a lobbying coalition aimed at influencing policy around age verification requirements and addressing long-standing grievances about app store practices.
You can now access Meta AI through a dedicated iPhone app, bringing the Llama AI assistant right to your fingertips. Until now, you could only access Meta AI through WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram.
Meta calls the app a first step toward creating a “more personal AI experience.”
Despite its flaws, Apple Intelligence packs some useful features. Among them, Writing Tools lets you rewrite, summarize, and proofread text using AI.
Sadly, you cannot use Writing Tools to draft your Facebook posts or WhatsApp chats, as Meta blocks the use of this feature in its apps.
Apple’s smart glasses are years from launch. But Meta plans to roll out a more sophisticated version of its popular Ray-Ban Meta glasses later this year.
It will reportedly support hand gestures and feature a screen to display pictures and apps.
Meta is reportedly exploring the development of AI-powered smartwatches and earbuds with built-in cameras. The social media giant is also working on AR glasses that could launch around 2027.
Before that, Meta will launch high-end smart glasses with a built-in display as soon as this year.
Contrary to popular opinion, Apple appears to be ahead in AI — and in some cases seems far in front of the competition. The revelation comes from an Apple white paper that hasn’t gotten much attention, but should.
A white paper on Apple’s Foundation Model, the company’s homegrown LLM (large-language model) that powers Apple Intelligence, reveals two important facts: it’s the safest in design and highly competitive with both Meta’s Llama and OpenAI’s GPT-4. This seems to debunk a big myth about Apple’s AI efforts: that the company’s privacy-first philosophy would hold it back.
The Apple Foundation Model is just as capable in tests of writing and summarization compared to the top LLMs by OpenAI, Meta, Mistral AI and others. And thanks to Apple’s strict guidelines for expunging harmful content, human-evaluated tests repeatedly rank its foundation model as the safest above all the rest — by a wide margin.
It looks like Apple Intelligence could be off to a good start.
In a move bound to raise eyebrows, Apple and Meta Platforms reportedly discussed integrating Meta’s generative AI model into Apple Intelligence. Besides Meta, AI startups Perplexity and Anthropic also reportedly talked with Apple about integrating their offerings into Apple Intelligence.
Update: The initial report of a possible partnership to bring Meta’s Llama large language model to Apple Intelligence made it sound like talks were ongoing. However, a new story published Monday said Apple rejected Meta’s LLM “months ago.”
Any time a company sends a push notification to an iPhone, its application can gather information about the user, including their location, according to security researchers. Meta and TikTok reportedly use push notification tracking, and many other companies do it, too.
Fortunately, there’s a simple solution for users to protect their privacy and keep apps from spying on them.
Meta just launched Threads, a new text-based social networking service that goes head-to-head with Twitter. Meta’s Facebook and Instagram have always competed with Twitter, of course, but Threads does so directly. The two apps are nearly identical.
Twitter has struggled since being acquired by Elon Musk in 2022, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg clearly sees an opportunity to supplant it.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks Apple’s $3,499 Vision Pro headset does not pack any significant technological breakthroughs. He claims his company explored all options used by Apple — but ultimately decided against them.
Zuckerberg expressed his thoughts on Vision Pro in a companywide meeting with Meta employees.
That’s some interesting timing on Meta’s press release Thursday for a VR headset not expected to come out until at least late September. Mark Zuckerberg and company wedged in a tease for Meta Quest 3 just four days ahead of WWDC23, when Apple is expected to unveil its much-anticipated AR/VR headset.
The Meta press materials even appropriated “we can’t wait,” one of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s trademark phrases.
New leaked details about Apple’s upcoming VR headset show the company is learning from mistakes made by makers of rival devices. Most notably, it’s reportedly creating a headset — possibly called “Reality Pro” — that will offer more realistic avatars, and won’t require the user to hold controllers in their hands.
Here are five ways Apple’s not making the same errors as Meta and other companies.
The web browser that Meta built into the iPhone Facebook and Instagram applications can collect far more information about users than they probably realize. It can “track every single interaction with external websites,” according to a developer.
But users don’t have to stay in this sketchy browser. Leaving it is easy – here’s how.
Both Apple and Meta (formerly Facebook) are both building AR/VR headsets, but they’re going about it in dramatically different ways. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly told Meta employees the two companies are in “a competition of philosophies and ideas.”
It’s possible the metaverse is the future of the internet. And Zuckerberg describes Meta as being a leader in creating an open metaverse with multiple companies working together, while he says Apple is creating its own closed version.
But Zuckerberg’s comments ignore another major philosophical difference between the twin companies. Apple believes in protecting user privacy, but Meta makes its money by collecting and selling information about users.
Looks like secure chat client WhatsApp just got a little livelier. Its long-promised emoji-based Reactions and newly developed Communities features for organizations rolled out on Thursday.
Users will have six emojis to play with to start. And in addition to new Communities, WhatsApp’s Groups functionality gets a revamp, too.
Facebook’s parent company Meta will claim almost half of the money third-party developers earn from sales in Horizon Worlds, the VR platform for Quest headsets. An Apple executive says that “lays bare Meta’s hypocrisy,” considering it has criticized Apple in the past for its 30% App Store fee.
In the middle of last year, Apple and Facebook parent company Meta Platforms gave customer data to hackers. They enticed the companies by pretending to be law enforcement officials, three people with knowledge of the matter said.
Facebook Messenger? Meta Messenger? Just Messenger? We don’t know what it’s supposed to be called these days. But we do know it just added a bunch of useful, Slack-like shortcuts that help you get things done faster.
You can use them to silently deliver messages without notifications, to find the perfect GIF, to send payments and more — all without having to fiddle around inside menus. And Meta says even more are coming later this year.